Space Conductive / Mathew Emmett

The work interprets the ‘psychotropic’ (Ballard, 1971:187) environment as a causal atmosphere. These spaces are associated with morphological time indexes and psychophysical signatures that trigger ‘ideas beyond its formal silhouette’ (Watson, 2011:99).

The work examines the evidential traces of adverse emotional embodiment within architectural structures. The analyses of these buildings resulted in the production of a design ordination database calibrated to articulate the interrelationship between body, mind and serial perceptual experiences—through time and space. By examining these mnemonic architectures an aperture can be opened to reveal an extreme mode of occupation, whereby these forgotten buildings resonate with an intense memory.

The work asked to what extent the space acted as an active agent in triggering these perceptual sensations in an attempt to qualify, understand and visualise the governing site-responsive signature that underlies these spaces.

The research reveals a continual transition from the corporeal to incorporeal registers, where the participants’ observations consistently observed a scissor-like experience of a being acutely aware of a pressurised body-space, whilst simultaneously registering the virtual domain of episodic memories. These experiential attributes I termed affect-order judgement, which is directly linked to the haptic and psychotropic attributes of negotiating these spaces.